Chapter 5
a còig / five
Ella gathered up Cal’s damp, discarded clothes.
She grated some carbolic and washed his holey underthings in the sink.
As she worked at the stains, she gossiped with the ewes that were clustered behind the house.
She bleated to her congregation. She would say something and wait for the ewes to respond before adding something else.
It sounded for all the world like a fascinating conversation.
In any foul weather, the sheep gathered like this and the house hummed with their moaning and the dull percussion of tinny bells.
They filled the air with a greenish kind of damp and made the kitchen sour with the stink of wet, greasy wool.
The flock had eaten the grass down to its roots and whenever Cal climbed the hill and looked back upon the croft, their mindless appetite gave the impression that the house was a meteor that had crashed and exterminated all life around it.
Cal listened to his grandmother’s chatter as he bumped down the stairs on his backside.
The cream paint was peeling from the stairs to reveal flecks of duck-egg blue.
It was a colour that brought memories of his mother’s loosened hair, the tips of it daubed with emulsion.
He sat on the bottom step and picked at a chip till more of the blue shone through.
He thought about visiting his mother, but there was a petty satisfaction in knowing she would hear about his return, a pleasure in imagining her waiting at the window, watching for him to come over the hill.
He came along the hallway. The house hadn’t been modernised since the fifties.
To the right was the good room, which was seldom used.
All their living was done on the left, in one long room that housed the kitchen in the rear and a cluttered family space at the front.
This room was choked with too much furniture and no matter how often Ella cleaned it, things always accumulated in teetering piles.
The kitchen was made up of painted cabinets.
Orange extension cords sprouted from outlets and snaked their way around the edges.
He slunk into the room and without saying good morning, he rifled in the breadbin.
Ella tutted. “If you’re bored, why don’t you go chap on folk? I could bake you some biscuits—”
“Who said I was bored? And I’m twenty-two, I’m not going door to door with my granny’s biscuits. Get a hold of yourself.” Only a few months ago he had been huddled in the Union discussing Tom Ford’s ascension with Gucci. “Here, why are you so brown?”
“Am I?” Ella smiled as she twisted her wrist. The top was darker than the uncooked ham of her underarm. In the morning light her face appeared sallow, like she had been washed in weak gravy.
Cal was starting to worry about her kidneys when she grabbed his hand and dragged him towards the pantry.
The year that John and Grace got married was the same year that Ella became a widow.
John had moved in with his new bride and her mother, into the croft house that had been in Ella’s husband’s family for generations.
When Grace fell pregnant, Ella had given the newlyweds the master bedroom and John had expanded the kitchen pantry by a few metres and converted it into a bedroom for her.
In a few short months, Ella had gone from the lady of the house to the woman in the cupboard.
Cal had never known the feeling of wandering into the kitchen without having his grandmother there.
Even in the middle of the night, the sound of his footsteps could bring her hobbling out from her room like some under-stairs maid.
She rarely slept and if he turned her away, if he said he could heat the milk himself, she would hover with a look of utter rejection.
The men had learnt to let her do everything until every cup of tea, every bit of sustenance, appeared miraculously before them.
Ella opened the door to her bedroom. Her single bed was tucked beneath the pantry shelves which, instead of soup tins and dried grains, held romance novels, skeins of yarn, and a menagerie of glass ornaments. She had a particular fondness for crystal teddies.
There was a large silver lamp facing out from the corner. The futuristic, metallic curves were incongruous with the humble room. Ella flicked it on and the space filled with a blinding, atomic light. She chuckled as Cal threw his hands over his eyes.
“I bought myself a sunbed.”
The machine should have been tilted over the bed, but Ella had set it up in the corner and aimed its beam into the middle of the narrow room.
They stood in its blue light, their eyes closed, their chins tilted upwards as though waiting for the rapture.
The sea, the wind, the complaints of the ewes, it all fell away under the hum of the incandescent tubes.
Ella flicked it off.
“I’m no running a salon. You’re mistaken if you think ye’ll be booking in for a wee sesh. And don’t mention it in front of your father. I had six weeks of black looks.”
Cal clutched an imaginary Bible to his bare breast, his hand to the heavens. John Knox in his boxer shorts. “Charm is deceptive, beauty is fleeting. But a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
She herded him back into the kitchen. “I just like how it feels. It makes us happy.”
“Well, you better not let Reverend Rose see your tan lines.”
“That’s your problem. You’re that young, you keep hopin’ to be the same person to everybody.”
Ella was born and raised in Glasgow and had come to the islands after the war. As a “newly-arrived”, she had learnt quickly to match her face to the person viewing it. Only with Cal was she irreverent, scornful, idle. Only with him did she speak her entire mind.
She turned to face him. “Oh, have you any new words for me?”
“I do.”
She put her hands on his chest and looked at him imploringly. “Oh, tell me then, tell me.”
He bared his teeth. He enunciated clearly. “Rantallion.”
She pulled back. “Ran-tal-lion? And what does that mean?”
“It describes a man whose balls are bigger than his tiny dick.”
She gasped in delight. “Oh, spell it. Spell it!”
And he spelled it for her.
She took a moment to commit it to memory. “Oh, I like it. It’s awfy regal sounding.”
When Cal was a boy, Ella would walk him along the shore, where they searched amongst the rocks for blobs of putrid ambergris.
Alone, against the shush of the sea, she gifted him a vocabulary of vulgar words with instructions that he was never to repeat them in front of his father.
Arsewipe, bawbag, fannybaws, walloper, tadger, spunktrumpet, cunt.
In the biting wind her face was animated with ridicule or menace as she took great care to enunciate each word clearly, demonstrating how Cal should posture himself as he delivered it.
“Plamph,” she had said.
“What?”
“P. L. A. M. P. H. Plamph. It’s when a man likes to sniff women’s gussets.”
Cal had been glad his cheeks were red from the wind. “Is it a noun or a verb?”
“How the fuck would I know? Just don’t let anyone ever call ye a plamph.
Or a snurger, for that matter.” She tapped a viscous-looking blob with the toe of her shoe.
They had been fooled before with washed up nuggets of congealed palm oil.
“Now, cunt is a tricky word to master. It’ll change its meaning dependin’ on how you say it.
But it’s awfy useful.” Ella went through all the intonations of it and had made Cal mimic her over and over, the pair of them barking at the sea as though they had Tourette’s.
She told him how she longed for someone to call her a “cunt” to her face.
Better that, she argued, than the usual thin smiles and boneless handshakes.
She nurtured an irreverence in him because “no woman liked an unfunny man”.
And at first it seemed she was only trying to balance out his father’s dourness.
But as he grew older, he came to realise that Ella had no real friends of her own and he wondered if she was turning him into the friend she needed most.
Ella muttered “rantallion” to herself as she rubbed a cake of carbolic into the stains.
Cal nudged against her, then he nudged her out of the way.
He put his mouth to the cold tap and drank deeply.
Beyond the kitchen window, across the pebbled path, he could hear his father working.
He could tell by the rhythm that the yardage was coming easy, without the interruption of snags or breakage.
Ella nodded at the sheep. “See that ewe? The one with the pink keel? Her name’s Ishbel.”
There were countless sheep hunkered in the crook of the house.
They were all looking in different directions, skulls empty of care or concern.
All except for Ishbel. Ishbel had her inquisitive black face raised above the matted sea of ecru fleece.
The cull ewe was staring up at the window as though she was listening to them talk.
“I don’t get around much, so wee Ishbel keeps a watch on things.
She lets me know what’s happenin’ up the road. ”
“You’ll be burnt at the stake.”
Ella giggled as she pushed a cup of tea towards him. “Ishbel telt me what you did last night. Telt me you had a lager, then you sat by the jetty in the dark? Why in God’s name would you do a thing lit that?”
“Stargazing.”
“Och, suit yourself, but I’ll find out sooner or later.” She resumed choking his laundry in her knuckled hands. “Wee Ishbel is the new bellwether.”
“Impossible,” he said. “A bellwether is always a castrated ram. It’s there, in the name.”
“Aye, and it was a ram up until last Christmas. Then your father noticed the flock were ignoring him and following aul’ Ishbel instead.”
“Hold the front page,” he said. “Feminism reaches Falabay.”
“Well, your father gave aul’ dickless the sack. Turnt the poor beast into dug meat.”